![]() Whether you want to call them ODLs or IDLs, the need to test on physical devices seems unlikely to lose momentum. ODLs are particularly popular in the UK and Germany, with other such labs popping up around the world. Privacy and competition are to be taken into account, this is where some companies posted excellent upfront statements and provided physical space separate from their regular offices - others didn’t. That’s why companies started assembling their own device labs - sometimes opening it up to others, thereby creating a new ODL.Īndre adds: In general, ODLs located at companies see way lower public usage as compared to ODLs in public places, like co-working spaces, libraries, or places that have been built solely for running the ODL. ODLs not being used by external people has to do with convenience and also with access to development infrastructure, which is mostly only available within a company. But reality shows that ODLs are often only used by their owners/administrators. And ODLs may also be blueprints for how to set up such a thing yourself, inhouse. ![]() ODLs served the purpose of steering the people’s interest towards the topic of real device testing. Many of the labs we spoke with originated on a company’s property, eventually opening up as ODLs to support the development work of others.Ĭhristian Schaefer, freelance front-end developer from the ODL initiative, says: I don’t think ODLs are important in today’s technical landscape, IDLs are. which sort of orbit around the target set of devices we are looking for. We have had several offers from these community members to donate Fitbit devices, old laptops, etc. Greg O’Toole, a lecturer at Penn State University, says: We have had fairly consistent interest and inquiry levels from groups and individual software developers from around the Penn State community and the PA community at large looking for ways to get involved and/or utilize the offerings of the over the past 24 months. This virtual testing environment now mainly uses BrowserStack and similar virtual machine (VM) platforms. ![]() Penn State University, for example, recently closed its ODL and replaced it with a virtual-only offering, due to a lack of funding, despite being the only one in the region. While new ODLs are opening at a constant rate, a handful of ODLs have closed down due to a lack of demand. There are now more than 150 ODLs in 35+ countries, but ODLs may have reached the peak of their popularity, given the growing attention on in-house device labs (IDLs). He adds: ODLs even provide ways to get stakeholders and customers to live the urge for necessary budget decisions on quality assurance, accessibility and I18n and L10n. Think of people producing content/apps for the first world, not taking less developed regions or those with a completely different mobile device landscape into account - the business will fail on one side, since UX or even plain accessibility will suck on the other. But, by far not everybody has access to the necessary test bed. ![]()
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